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Freud and the Matter of the Brain on the Rearrangements of Neuropsychoanalysis

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Freud and the Matter of the Brain on the Rearrangements of Neuropsychoanalysis Freud and the Matter of the Brain: On the Rearrangements of Neuropsychoanalysis Nima Bassiri 1. Neuropsychoanalysis and the Problem of History During the course of the past several decades and within the context of certain psychiatric and neuroscientific circles, psychoanalysis has become a topic of renewed interest, whose future has appeared to be in need of defending. Publications appearing as early as the mid-1980s have sought either tacitly or quite openly to resuscitate and defend the potential legiti- macy of psychoanalytic theory and practice.1 Neuropsychiatrist Eric Kan- del, a longtime participant in this discussion (and recipient of the 2000 Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the American Psychoanalytic Association, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and the Program in Literature at Duke University. I am grateful to organizers and participants at these events as well as to the editorial board of Critical Inquiry for their comments. I am especially grateful to a small group of scholars and faculty at Wesleyan University who read and offered some of the first and most encouraging feedback on the earliest draft of this paper. The completion of this article was assisted by a New Faculty Fellows award from the American Council of Learned Societies, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. 1. Some examples include Arnold M. Cooper, “Will Neurobiology Influence Psychoanalysis?” American Journal of Psychiatry 142 (Dec. 1985): 1395–1402; Morton F. Reiser, “Converging Sectors of Psychoanalysis and Neurobiology: Mutual Challenge and Opportunity,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 33 (Feb. 1985): 11–34 and Mind, Brain, Body: Towards a Convergence of Psychoanalysis and Neurobiology (New York, 1984); Antonio R. Damasio, “Toward a Neurobiology of Emotion and Feeling: Operational Concepts and Hypotheses,” The Neuroscientist 1 (Jan. 1995): 19–25; Allan N. Schore, “A Century after Freud’s Project: Is a Rapprochement between Psychoanalysis and Neurobiology at Hand?” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 45 (Sept. 1997): 807–40; Eric R. Kandel, “A New Intellectual Framework for Psychiatry,” American Journal of Psychiatry 155 (Apr. 1998): 457–69; and Oliver W. Sacks, “Sigmund Freud: The Other Road,” in Freud and the Neurosciences: From Brain Research to the Unconscious, ed. Giselher Guttmann and Inge Scholtz-Strasser (Vienna, 1998), pp. 11–22. Critical Inquiry 40 (Autumn 2013) © 2013 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/13/4001-0002$10.00. All rights reserved. 83 This content downloaded from 151.197.183.37 on Tue, 29 Jun 2021 19:19:19 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 84 Nima Bassiri / Freud and Neuropsychoanalysis Nobel Prize in medicine) provided at the end of the 1990s the most candid account of how double-edged the new defense of psychoanalysis actually was:2 If psychoanalysis is to regain its intellectual power and influence, it will need more than the stimulus that comes from responding to its hostile critics. One way that psychoanalysis might re-energize it- self . is by developing a closer relationship with biology in general and with cognitive neuroscience in particular....From a conceptual point of view, cognitive neuroscience could provide a new foundation for the future growth of psychoanalysis, a foundation that is perhaps more satisfactory than metapsychology.3 What psychoanalysis ultimately needed to be defended against or so it was suggested was itself—its own inevitable obsolescence, a consequence of its inability or refusal to evolve as a natural, experimental science. Only through the context of cognitive neuroscience and neurobiology, these researchers proposed, could psychoanalysis remain not only relevant but also impactful in the behavioral sciences. The very same year that Kandel advocated for a neuroscientific reener- gizing of psychoanalysis, the term neuropsychoanalysis was formalized in the publication of an eponymously titled journal. The first issue of Neuro- Psychoanalysis was coedited by neuropsychologist Mark Solms, one of the cofounders of the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society located in London. Solms has not only been one of the most vocal advocates of a convergence of neuroscientific and psychoanalytic approaches, but he has also become the editor spearheading the revision and partial retranslation of James Strachey’s Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.4 2. Earlier contributions include Kandel, “Psychotherapy and the Single Synapse: The Impact of Psychiatric Thought on Neurobiological Research,” New England Journal of Medicine, 8 Nov. 1979, pp. 1028–37 and “From Metapsychology to Molecular Biology: Explorations into the Nature of Anxiety,” American Journal of Psychiatry 140 (Oct. 1983): 1277–93. 3. Kandel, “Biology and the Future of Psychoanalysis: A New Intellectual Framework for Psychiatry Revisited,” American Journal of Psychiatry 156 (Apr. 1999): 506–7. 4. See Sigmund Freud, The Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of N IMA B ASSIRI is currently an American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow at Duke University and a postdoctoral affiliate of the Duke Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory. He teaches in the Program in Literature, the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, and the Department of Philosophy. This content downloaded from 151.197.183.37 on Tue, 29 Jun 2021 19:19:19 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2013 85 In the editorial introduction of the first issue, Solms, along with Edward Nersessian, explain that the interdisciplinary field of neuropsychoanalysis assumes “the aim of reconciling psychoanalytic and neuroscientific per- spectives on the mind. It should be possible somehow to reconcile their viewpoints with one another.”5 Solms and coauthor Oliver Turnbull ex- plain in their book The Brain and the Inner World that neuropsychoanaly- sis represents a research program that aims to produce “a method by means of which one and the same thing can be studied simultaneously from both the psychoanalytic and the neuroscientific perspectives.”6 As this emerging field gained greater coherence and popularity, it became clear that neuro- psychoanalysis comprised something of an umbrella term for any research that could justifiably be situated along the boundary of psychoanalysis, broadly construed, and the neurosciences in their general, already multi- disciplinary sense.7 But what have marked neuropsychoanalytic writing and research through- out the past decades—especially the contributions by Solms—are contro- versial justifications for the legitimacy as well as the efficacy of the neuropsychoanalytic endeavor. In their disciplinary merger, it has been argued, psychoanalysis and the neurosciences could directly benefit one another; the neurosciences could be infused with a more robust theory of subjective experience while psychoanalysis could make the transition to becoming a testable, experimental science.8 One seemingly essential justification for the merger, however, has been historical in nature. The fact that Freud began his career in both clinical and experimental neurology and neuropathology has accompanied and in some cases subtended all other rationalizations for the viability, necessity, and future of neuropsychoanalysis.9 Much of Solms’s own writings have Sigmund Freud, ed. Solms, 24 vols. (forthcoming). For a discussion of the forthcoming Revised Standard Edition, see Solms, “Notes on the Revised Standard Edition,” Psychoanalytic Review 100, no. 1 (2013): 201–10. A mere sample of Solms’s individual and coauthored neuropsychoanalytic publications include Solms and Oliver Turnbull, “What Is Neuropsychoanalysis?” Neuropsychoanalysis 13, no. 2 (2011): 133–45; Solms, “Freud, Luria, and the Clinical Method,” Journal of Psychoanalysis and History 2 (Feb. 2000): 76–109; and Karen Kaplan-Solms and Solms, Clinical Studies in Neuro-Psychoanalysis: Introduction to a Depth Psychology (London, 2000). 5. Solms and Edward Nersessian, “Editors Introduction,” Neuro-Psychoanalysis 1, no. 1 (1999): 3. 6. Solms and Turnbull, The Brain and the Inner World: An Introduction to the Neuroscience of Subjective Experience (New York, 2002), p. 307. 7. See Solms and Turnbull, “What Is Neuropsychoanalysis?” p. 141. 8. See ibid. 9. For more on Freud’s early work in neurology, see Harald Leupold-Löwenthal, “Freud as This content downloaded from 151.197.183.37 on Tue, 29 Jun 2021 19:19:19 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 86 Nima Bassiri / Freud and Neuropsychoanalysis included attempts to reread the history of Freud’s so-called prepsychoana- lytic work. It is possible, Solms in particular has argued, to read the later metapsychology as continuous with (or, at least, not resistant to) Freud’s earlier neurological career.10 This argument has often been bolstered with cherry-picked passages from Freud’s writings in which he appears to extol the virtues of biology or seems to suggest that a biological methodology would have been his preferred approach to clinical medicine. Freud only abandoned his biological efforts, so the argument goes, because a properly dynamic neurology (to match the dynamism of psychical processes) was not yet available, and, therefore, the metapsychology merely anticipated a rigorously biological psychoanalysis, which Freud was not himself able to consummate.11 In contrast, as Solms in particular contends, the conditions for a dy- namic neurology have today
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